The Two Boats at the Shore
by F E J D
Summary: A glimpse into Severus' afterlife. Mainly fluff... I may add another chapter if you wish  :


"Look...at...me."

Severus' last words escaped from his mouth with the last of his breath. The Potter boy turned towards him and with one final effort Severus pulled him down to his face. For the first time since he'd seen Harry at his sorting, nearly seven years ago, Severus allowed himself to feel compassion for him.

He looked into Potter's emerald eyes, and he saw Lily. Not only in their colour and their shape; Potter's eyes burned with Lily's own compassion and grief. Looking up at those eyes, he could at last see what Dumbledore had seen all along in Potter.

That was Severus' final, coherent, thought. With his next blink, the eyes before him no longer belonged to Harry, but to Lily herself, who stood, smiling and wavering slightly above him. With one final flutter of his eyelids, all was black.

Severus felt like a disembodied mind, floating in the darkness that surrounded his body. He wondered for a split second how a disembodied mind could have a body, when there was a pleasant tingling in the ends of his fingers.

Gradually, he stretched out his extremities, moving inwards, twisting his elbows, knees, shoulders and hips until he had confirmed that he was not a disembodied mind after all, but in fact a mind with a definite physical presence.

Beneath Severus, there was also a hard, unforgiving floor. Perhaps he hadn't thought it through, but somehow he had expected the afterlife to be less like... life? Severus found that the air felt the same as he breathed; the floor he was pressed against by his weight felt the same, he still felt the warmth of his cloak and shirt, and at the ends of his feet his toes were still trapped in his shoes.

There was, however, something almost intangibly different. Severus opened his eyes, and surveyed his surroundings. He could feel stones pressing into his front, and as he looked up he realised that he was on the cobbled shore of a great lake.

A great ,_white_ lake.

Everything was lifelike in appearance, except that it was all _blank._ Like a canvas waiting to be painted. Severus pushed up from the floor, and saw two little boats to either side of him, just a way down the shore, waiting for him. He took a pace forward over the crunching pebbles, and gazed down at his reflection. And then it hit him.

The difference – he looked, and felt, about twenty-one again. He was slimmer, notably in the face and stomach, and his skin smoother and tauter. The anxiety line between his brows was perceptibly lessened, although not entirely, and there was something less of an air of fatigue in his coal-black eyes.

He was unquestionably dead. And yet, he didn't feel it at all. He felt so young, so alive; his blood was still hot and his mouth still wet. Around him, a wind blew through his shorter, thicker hair. This was a new kind of magic. And, it transpired, he wasn't the only life he could see.

In either boat a figure sat, nearly motionless, facing away from him. He took a pace towards one boat, and the figure seemed to flicker a little more strongly, be a little more alive. The same happened when he stepped towards the other boat. And yet, from this distance he could barely discern the face of either figure.

Their silhouettes, which, like a wash of watercolour against canvas, had just the faintest tint of colour about them, were very different however. To his right, a man sat, rigidly upright. To his left, a woman. They both held the punts for the boats, so it was unmistakably a choice of which way he wanted to go. With whom did he choose to venture on?

Severus stepped tentatively to the right, his cloaks billowing softly in the wind. He cocked his head to one side as curiosity won. The figure was almost as pallid as his backdrop, but he wore inky black robes that settled over his skeletal form like cobwebs. They, too, fluttered in the breeze. The figure seemed to beckon with one curled finger.

The eyes glowed red.

Severus turned in anger. It was too familiar; this choice. He hoped that, if this was one option, the other would be what it had been all those years ago. And he prayed that he would have the strength, if it was, to make the right decision this time. He wrenched his gaze from the figure of Voldemort, and swept in the other direction.

The closer he came to the other boat, the faster beat his heart. The woman who sat there, and stood as he approached, arms outstretched, had fiery red hair and large emerald eyes that were positively aglow.

"Lily," he breathed. Severus' knees grew immediately weak, and his heart skipped a beat. He had never stopped loving her, and in return she had awaited him at the shore of the lake of his own heaven. For every moment he had loved her, so intensely and all-consummately, they would spend a perfect eternity together. Perhaps he finally deserved her, although he scarcely allowed himself to think this. Instead, he merely held open his arms, inviting her to his embrace.

"I cannot come to you, my love," the wind itself seemed to ring with her melodious voice. "You must choose."

Snape turned on the spot, and gave Voldemort one final glance. _Not this time,_ he thought, and in four long strides he was in the boat, tumbling into Lily's arms.


End file.
